“Too often I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen...” – Louis L’Amour
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| (The Angel Statue) |
Date: 8 May 2017 (Monday)
Route: Leeds – Gateshead
Distance: 94 miles (1 hr 51 min)
After breakfast, we drove towards north to Gateshead on the A1 Motorway. Gateshead was a major shipbuilding and manufacturing hub during the Industrial Revolution and is now a centre of business, arts and sciences.
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| (Entering the town of Gateshead) |
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| (Gateshead's medieval streets) |
Gateshead is a town in Tyne and Wear, England, on the southern bank of the River Tyne opposite Newcastle upon Tyne. Gateshead and Newcastle are joined by seven bridges across the Tyne, including the Gateshead Millennium Bridge.
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| (The Sage Gateshead is a concert venue and musical centre) |
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| (The Swing Bridge Gateshead/Newcastle) |
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| (The King Edward VII Bridge, Gateshead) |
The town is known for its architecture, including the Sage Gateshead, the Angel of the North and the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. Residents of Gateshead, like the rest of Tyneside, are referred to as Geordies.
The Angel of the North stands on the hill of Birtley, overlooking the A1 Highway. Travellers entering Gateshead via the A1 will not miss this imposing structure.
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| (A fascinating icon) |
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| (The wing span is greater than a Boeing 767 aircraft) |
The Angel of the North is designed by Antony Gormley. It is a contemporary steel sculpture of an angel, 20 metres tall, with wings measuring 54 metres across. The wings do not stand straight sideways, but are angled 3.5 degrees forward to create a sense of embrace.
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(The largest angel statue in the world)
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| (Britain's largest sculpture) |
According to the designer, the significance of an angel was three-fold: first, to signify that beneath the site of its construction, coal miners worked for two centuries; second, to grasp the transition from an industrial to an information age, and third, to serve as a focus for mankind evolving hopes and fears.
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| (The Millennium Bridge has a scheduled tilting for ships to pass) |
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| (The bridge links Newcastle bank and Gateshead Quays) |
The Gateshead Millennium Bridge is a pedestrian and cyclist tilt bridge spanning the River Tyne in England between Gateshead's Quays arts quarter on the south bank, and the Quayside of Newcastle upon Tyne on the north bank. The award-winning structure is sometimes referred to as the 'Blinking Eye Bridge' or the 'Winking Eye Bridge' due to its shape and its tilting method. In terms of height, the Gateshead Millennium Bridge is slightly shorter than the neighbouring Tyne Bridge, and stands as the sixteenth tallest structure in the city.
